barely got below the surface before I hit what seemed to be a layer of impenetrable rock. I knew from experience that the DEA was rarely interested in talking about open cases, and these two were no exception. “I’m sorry, Evan. There isn’t any information we can confirm, deny, or discuss right now, unfortunately,” a DEA spokesperson replied when I contacted him. Defense lawyers often leap to proclaim their client’s innocence, but most of the attorneys in the two cases were unwilling to comment at all. Others would only meet in person, outside their office, and talk off the record. One lawyer I called just happened to pick up his phone one afternoon. He’d left that case, he told me, and didn’t want to dis- cuss it. I kept him on the line long enough to ask about the myste- rious “Individual-1” at the center of the case. He laughed. “Oh, you mean Keyser Söze?” he said, referring to the elusive master criminal at the center of the film The Usual Suspects. Then he re- ferred me to the new lawyer on the case and hung up. That lawyer never responded to my inquiries.

And then, suddenly: a name. It came in late 2014, in a leak from an anonymous official at the DEA to a New York Times reporter named Alan Feuer, who was covering the federal courthouse where Hunter was to be tried. “Individual-1,” the official revealed, was a South African named Paul Calder Le Roux, a computer program- mer and some kind of international cartel boss. The DEA official called Le Roux “Viktor Bout on steroids”—a reference to the no- torious global arms dealer who had been prosecuted by the South- ern District of New York back in 2011. Le Roux, in the anonymous official’s telling, was a computer genius who had built an empire selling prescription drugs over the Internet, and then leveraged that fortune into international crimes, from arms trafficking to contract murder. He was also the man who connected Joseph Hunter and his hit team to the crew smuggling meth out of North Korea. All of the figures involved had worked not for Hunter, but for Le Roux. And now it seemed Le Roux had turned against them and was helping the government run them down.

For a brief moment it seemed that the mystery I’d been chasing